Changing Your Stars
One of my favorite movies is A Knight’s Tale, staring Heath Ledger. In it he plays William Thatcher, the son of a thatcher (as in, a maker of thatched roofs) who is told by his caring father to go forth and change his stars as he hands him over to a knight to apprentice the boy and give him opportunity he might not otherwise get in Cheapside, where he is from. I like the movie for a number of reasons, but besides the bootstrap theme, which is hard not to like, there is the charm of combining a reasonably authentic-seeming Medieval England (and France) with the modern twist of the rousing music of Queen, blaring out especially during the pageantry of the games amongst the knights. The combination of old and new is an intoxicating blend that never ceases to entertain. The production value of the film is first class and the ensemble, including Paul Bethany as Geoffrey Chaucer is perfectly in tune with this mix of old and new and it all just works.
We have been raised in times when all things are possible, and the prospect of changing our stars has not seemed so far fetched as it must have in Medieval times. I know that to some I am considered a man of great privilege, being the son of an Ivy League graduate (my mother) and an Ivy League graduate myself who spent a career on Wall Street where the Big Dogs roam. But I feel it necessary to make the case as to how close I came to having none of that in my stars.
To begin with, I was born with a last name of Prosdocimi. That was my father’s birth name and the name I carried until the age of eight, when he changed it. While my parents were divorced at the time, my mother had no difficulty changing our collective name to Marin, which presented a far easier barrier to acceptance than dragging a name like Prosdocimi around. I have often wondered how my life would have been different if that had been my name through life. My sisters would have escaped it in their twenties, but I would have it still unless I had taken to changing it myself, which likely would not have happened. You might think that a name is an insignificant issue in life, but that is simply a naive thought. I am sure that my life would have been harder in one way or another because people would have invariably treated someone with a difficult and ethnic-sounding name differently than I had been treated.
Then there was the issue of my vision. I had a stronger than normal astigmatism that went undiagnosed for some reason until Fourth Grade. Even though my early schooling in a one-room schoolhouse on the Costa Rican institute grounds in that tropical valley in which we lived gave rise to me skipping Second Grade, I struggled in Third through Sixth Grades to catch up and the thing that suffered the most from the deficiency of vision was my reading. I needed to spend two summers in my junior high years in Maine doing remedial reading work with a reading machine to force me to read faster. My eyes had caused me to be a slow reader and it was creating a learning hindrance that my mother, an educationalist by training, insisted that I work to correct. When I started in prep school, I was anything but a strong student and can recall seeing more C’s and a D or two to give me the fear of God that I was less likely to find a good college to attend.
My move to Rome seemed to come at at good time since my grades improved enough and my standardized testing was good enough to give me an opening into the Cornell Engineering program. I had applied to only three schools, with great misguided assumption. I applied to Stanford, Yale and Cornell, not even bothering to find a “safe” school as most people had. Luckily, and, I suspect, because fewer young men wanted to go into engineering in 1971, I got into Cornell. My mother had never given a dime to the school, so I doubt the legacy card bought me any consideration at all. I just got lucky.
Where most of my Cornell friends came to college with strong vocational goals well-established, I didn’t have a clue and it took me all of my four years at Cornell to figure out where I might head after graduation. Once again, I think I got lucky because Cornell and all the other business schools (except perhaps Harvard, Wharton and Stanford) were really a gathering of second stringers, the best and the brightest having gone off to medical or law school (or perhaps graduate school), but not to business school for the most part. I personally found the curriculum much more forgiving than my undergraduate economics program had been.
Wall Street has its ups and downs like all businesses and I joined that hunt just at the beginning of a dramatic upswing in the business when innovation suddenly became a critical ingredient. Good thing for me, because I am far less a process banker sort than a financial innovator and the shift in the business suited me extremely well and allowed me to prosper over forty-five years. Some think that Wall Street banking is reserved for people of privilege. That is not a faulty assumption and I can say that the rich and relatively well-connected have more entries into the field than others do. Some are Waspy sorts who live in Greenwich, Connecticut and others are landed Jewish gentry who drive in from Great Neck, Long Island. I have applied to four clubs in my years in NYC and I was admitted to only two of them and probably those two just barely admitted me. I was a member of the NYAC for a year and a member of Westchester Country Club for perhaps three years. Both the Greenwich Country Club and the Rockaways Hunt Club rejected me, giving some innocuous excuse, but rejecting me nonetheless when others around me (including several people who worked directly for me) gained admittance. I don’t really know what that says, but my point is simply that I have been very much on the fringe of acceptability to the community on Wall Street, not at all in the mainstream. And yet I far exceeded most of my peers in success and seniority, which I claim was despite not having any advantage. I am not suggesting I am an underdog, but rather that I was a lot less privileged than many.
And then there is my size, my bulk. I have no trouble admitting that men have an easier time being big than women do (for sure), but there is a decided bias that favors the slender over the corpulent in modern business and social life. All of this is merely to say that I have one grandfather who worked in the salt mines and ran rum during Prohibition and another who was a disgraced Fascist who opened a grocery store in an out-of-the-way dusty spot in Venezuela. My mother bootstrapped herself into an education and my father never got one and had to pretend to have a diploma.
If I was privileged, it was by virtue of being born a white American. There is no doubt that those are both advantages and legs up in the modern world, whether they should be or not. I think it is fair to say my grandparents had to go to great lengths (moving halfway around the world) to change their stars. My mother and father had a lesser distance to go, but they too needed gumption to get up and go to induce a change of their lives. As I’ve tried to explain, my path was anything but assured, so I will claim a bit of credit for changing my stars, not as dramatically as William Thatcher perhaps, but changed nonetheless.